In praise of ... Nonsuch Palace

In Xanadu, says Coleridge, where Alph the sacred river ran down to a sunless sea, the emperor Kubla Khan established a stately pleasure-dome. Three centuries later, in northern Surrey, close to the point where today the Ewell bypass intersects with the A24, Henry VIII did much the same thing. Eager to emulate the great French creations Chambord and Fontainebleau, he had built for him, sweeping away the village of Cuddington, a palace so fanciful and magnificent that it came to be known as Nonsuch. Fontainebleau and Chambord survive, but Nonsuch lasted less than 150 years – demolished by Barbara Villiers, mistress of Charles II, to whom it had passed, to meet her gambling debts. Thereafter it vanished so utterly that no one was sure quite where it had been until the borough librarian of Epsom and Ewell, John Dent, plotted the spot with an accuracy that excavations in 1959 fully confirmed. That we know what it looked like, with its magical towers and turrets, is almost entirely due to the work of Joris Hoefnagel, who furnished many pictures for a cartographical work called Civitates Orbis Terrarum, recording the cities, settlements and great buildings of Europe, published between 1572 and 1617. It's a mark of his work's importance that his watercolour of Nonsuch, rarely ever exhibited, is expected to fetch up to £1.2m at auction at Christie's next month. If the palace still stood, the world would flock down the A24 and Ewell bypass to wonder at it, just as they do to Chambord.